As the applause faded at the end of Harrison Birtwistle's latest chamber opera, The Io Passion, a member of the audience rolled his eyes, sighed, and muttered audibly, 'Only in Islington.' We had just watched a production that included Zeus' onstage rape of the king of Argos' daughter, Io, in an Edwardian living room. As Io sprawled across a writing desk with Zeus, in the guise of a bull, mounting her, the ravished soprano sang out in accelerating high-pitched, syncopated shrieks - the operatic counterpart of Meg Ryan doing the famous simulated climax scene in When Harry Met Sally.
The Almeida Theatre in North London's trendy Islington, erstwhile home of Prime Minister Tony Blair, is famous for producing quality cutting-edge drama. For three weeks each year it also becomes home to a short season of modern opera. This year, new works by three British composers with significant birthdays were performed: John Woolrich's 50th was celebrated with his work, The Sea and Its Shore, Michael Nyman's 60th with his chamber opera, Man and Boy: Dada, and Birtwistle's 70th with The Io Passion.
Birtwistle is a theatrically minded composer and the starting point for The Io Passion was a visual idea - a stage setting that revealed both the inside and outside of an Edwardian house, both seen at the same time in a set broken up into diagonally reflecting quarters. The opera was originally developed through workshops at the National Theatre studio with writer Stephen Plaice, and director Stephen Langridge. The result was a mix of a modern story about an alienated couple who communicate through letters after a passionate holiday in Greece, and the ancient myth of Zeus and Io.
The set was suitably disorientating for an opera that mixed the real and the mythic, with strong echoes of Escher's brain-teasing architecture and Duchamp's surrealism. The main characters, a man and woman, are each represented by three performers - two singers and an actor. The opera opened with a man in the street: we watch his back as he posts a letter through a door. At the same time the letter appears through the letter box of the interior room immediately beside him where a woman sits reading a book. Through the interior window we also see the front of the man posting the letter, and through the window onto the street we see a mirror image of the seated woman. No one sang a note for the first 20 minutes and the surreal mirroring and repetition of actions was mesmerising.
But this spell was broken as both doors opened to admit gaudily dressed Greek gods and goddesses who acted out the myth, culminating in the soprano shrieks of Io.
Birtwistle's intricate music, played by the Quatuor Diotima and clarinettist Alan Hacker, a long-term Birtwistle collaborator, was intense and expressive, but in the end the cringe-making pagan scenes were enough to make anyone's eyes roll.